Volpone Aka The Fox

229 Pages·2016·0.57 MB·English

by  Johnson Ben

VOLPONE; OR, THE FOX
BY BEN JONSON
INTRODUCTION

The greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator
and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most
potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English
letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an
interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age.
Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world
Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson’s grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway,
whence he migrated to England. Jonson’s father lost his estate under Queen
Mary, “having been cast into prison and forfeited.” He entered the church, but
died a month before his illustrious son was born, leaving his widow and child in
poverty. Jonson’s birthplace was Westminster, and the time of his birth early in
1573. He was thus nearly ten years Shakespeare’s junior, and less well off, if a
trifle better born. But Jonson did not profit even by this slight advantage. His
mother married beneath her, a wright or bricklayer, and Jonson was for a time
apprenticed to the trade. As a youth he attracted the attention of the famous
antiquary, William Camden, then usher at Westminster School, and there the
poet laid the solid foundations of his classical learning. Jonson always held
Camden in veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed,
“All that I am in arts, all that I know;”
and dedicating his first dramatic success, “Every Man in His Humour,” to him. It
is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either university, though Fuller says that
he was “statutably admitted into St. John’s College, Cambridge.” He tells us that
he took no degree, but was later “Master of Arts in both the universities, by their
favour, not his study.” When a mere youth Jonson enlisted as a soldier, trailing
his pike in Flanders in the protracted wars of William the Silent against the
Spanish. Jonson was a large and raw-boned lad; he became by his own account
in time exceedingly bulky. In chat with his friend William Drummond of
Hawthornden, Jonson told how “in his service in the Low Countries he had, in
the face of both the camps, killed an enemy, and taken opima spolia from him;”
and how “since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had
killed his adversary which had hurt him in the arm and whose sword was ten
inches longer than his.” Jonson’s reach may have made up for the lack of his
sword; certainly his prowess lost nothing in the telling. Obviously Jonson was
brave, combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings.
In 1592, Jonson returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married, almost
as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond curtly that
“his wife was a shrew, yet honest”; for some years he lived apart from her in the
household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson’s
“Epigrams,” “On my first daughter,” and “On my first son,” attest the warmth of
the poet’s family affections. The daughter died in infancy, the son of the plague;
another son grew up to manhood little credit to his father whom he survived. We
know nothing beyond this of Jonson’s domestic life.
How soon Jonson drifted into what we now call grandly “the theatrical
profession” we do not know. In 1593, Marlowe made his tragic exit from life,
and Greene, Shakespeare’s other rival on the popular stage, had preceded
Marlowe in an equally miserable death the year before. Shakespeare already had
the running to himself. Jonson appears first in the employment of Philip
Henslowe, the exploiter of several troupes of players, manager, and father-in-law
of the famous actor, Edward Alleyn. From entries in “Henslowe’s Diary,” a
species of theatrical account book which has been handed down to us, we know
that Jonson was connected with the Admiral’s men; for he borrowed 4 pounds of
Henslowe, July 28, 1597, paying back 3s. 9d. on the same day on account of his
“share” (in what is not altogether clear); while later, on December 3, of the same
year, Henslowe advanced 20s. to him “upon a book which he showed the plot
unto the company which he promised to deliver unto the company at Christmas
next.” In the next August Jonson was in collaboration with Chettle and Porter in
a play called “Hot Anger Soon Cold.” All this points to an association with
Henslowe of some duration, as no mere tyro would be thus paid in advance upon
mere promise. From allusions in Dekker’s play, “Satiromastix,” it appears that
Jonson, like Shakespeare, began life as an actor, and that he “ambled in a leather
pitch by a play-wagon” taking at one time the part of Hieronimo in Kyd’s
famous play, “The Spanish Tragedy.” By the beginning of 1598, Jonson, though
still in needy circumstances, had begun to receive recognition. Francis Meres—
well known for his “Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek,
Latin, and Italian Poets,” printed in 1598, and for his mention therein of a dozen
plays of Shakespeare by title—accords to Ben Jonson a place as one of “our best
in tragedy,” a matter of some surprise, as no known tragedy of Jonson from so
early a date has come down to us. That Jonson was at work on tragedy, however,
is proved by the entries in Henslowe of at least three tragedies, now lost, in
which he had a hand. These are “Page of Plymouth,” “King Robert II. of
Scotland,” and “Richard Crookback.” But all of these came later, on his return to
Henslowe, and range from August 1599 to June 1602.
Returning to the autumn of 1598, an event now happened to sever for a time
Jonson’s relations with Henslowe. In a letter to Alleyn, dated September 26 of
that year, Henslowe writes: “I have lost one of my company that hurteth me
greatly; that is Gabriel [Spencer], for he is slain in Hogsden fields by the hands
of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer.” The last word is perhaps Henslowe’s thrust at
Jonson in his displeasure rather than a designation of his actual continuance at
his trade up to this time. It is fair to Jonson to remark however, that his adversary
appears to have been a notorious fire-eater who had shortly before killed one
Feeke in a similar squabble. Duelling was a frequent occurrence of the time
among gentlemen and the nobility; it was an impudent breach of the peace on the
part of a player. This duel is the one which Jonson described years after to
Drummond, and for it Jonson was duly arraigned at Old Bailey, tried, and
convicted. He was sent to prison and such goods and chattels as he had “were
forfeited.” It is a thought to give one pause that, but for the ancient law
permitting convicted felons to plead, as it was called, the benefit of clergy,
Jonson might have been hanged for this deed. The circumstance that the poet
could read and write saved him; and he received only a brand of the letter “T,”
for Tyburn, on his left thumb. While in jail Jonson became a Roman Catholic;
but he returned to the faith of the Church of England a dozen years later.
On his release, in disgrace with Henslowe and his former associates, Jonson
offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe’s rivals, the Lord
Chamberlain’s company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder. A
tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law,
narrates that Jonson had submitted the manuscript of “Every Man in His
Humour” to the Chamberlain’s men and had received from the company a
refusal; that Shakespeare called him back, read the play himself, and at once
accepted it. Whether this story is true or not, certain it is that “Every Man in His
Humour” was accepted by Shakespeare’s company and acted for the first time in
1598, with Shakespeare taking a part. The evidence of this is contained in the list
of actors prefixed to the comedy in the folio of Jonson’s works, 1616. But it is a
mistake to infer, because Shakespeare’s name stands first in the list of actors and
the elder Kno’well first in the dramatis personae, that Shakespeare took that
particular part. The order of a list of Elizabethan players was generally that of
their importance or priority as shareholders in the company and seldom if ever
corresponded to the list of characters.
“Every Man in His Humour” was an immediate success, and with it Jonson’s
reputation as one of the leading dramatists of his time was established once and
for all. This could have been by no means Jonson’s earliest comedy, and we have
just learned that he was already reputed one of “our best in tragedy.” Indeed, one
of Jonson’s extant comedies, “The Case is Altered,” but one never claimed by
him or published as his, must certainly have preceded “Every Man in His
Humour” on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled
on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the
“Captivi” and the “Aulularia” of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the
beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics,
but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on
the stage. Jonson never again produced so fresh and lovable a feminine
personage as Rachel, although in other respects “The Case is Altered” is not a
conspicuous play, and, save for the satirising of Antony Munday in the person of
Antonio Balladino and Gabriel Harvey as well, is perhaps the least characteristic
of the comedies of Jonson.
“Every Man in His Humour,” probably first acted late in the summer of 1598
and at the Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play; and this
view is not unjustified. As to plot, it tells little more than how an intercepted
letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly studious son to London, and
there observe his life with the gallants of the time. The real quality of this
comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which they are conceived.
Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in
talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson,
like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with;
particularly when we remember that many of Jonson’s notions came for a time
definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all
Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in
opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit.
Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might
be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the
most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson
objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary
plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking
thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of humours.
As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own
words as to “humour.” A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition,
a warp, so to speak, in character by which
“Some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his
affects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way.”
But continuing, Jonson is careful to add:
“But that a rook by wearing a pied feather, The cable hat-band, or the three-piled
ruff, A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot On his French garters, should affect
a humour! O, it is more than most ridiculous.”
Jonson’s comedy of humours, in a word, conceived of stage personages on the
basis of a ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification of actual life be it
observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their
conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name
indicates, is “a plain squire”; Bobadill’s humour is that of the braggart who is
incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm’s humour
is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is
fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson’s theories alone that made the
success of “Every Man in His Humour.” The play is admirably written and each
character is vividly conceived, and with a firm touch based on observation of the
men of the London of the day. Jonson was neither in this, his first great comedy
(nor in any other play that he wrote), a supine classicist, urging that English
drama return to a slavish adherence to classical conditions. He says as to the
laws of the old comedy (meaning by “laws,” such matters as the unities of time
and place and the use of chorus): “I see not then, but we should enjoy the same
licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they [the
ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness
of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us.” “Every Man in His
Humour” is written in prose, a novel practice which Jonson had of his
predecessor in comedy, John Lyly. Even the word “humour” seems to have been
employed in the Jonsonian sense by Chapman before Jonson’s use of it. Indeed,
the comedy of humours itself is only a heightened variety of the comedy of
manners which represents life, viewed at a satirical angle, and is the oldest and
most persistent species of comedy in the language. None the less, Jonson’s
comedy merited its immediate success and marked out a definite course in which
comedy long continued to run. To mention only Shakespeare’s Falstaff and his
rout, Bardolph, Pistol, Dame Quickly, and the rest, whether in “Henry IV.” or in
“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” all are conceived in the spirit of humours. So
are the captains, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish of “Henry V.,” and Malvolio especially
later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an
important personage. It was not Jonson’s fault that many of his successors did
precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade “the humour: into an
oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was
an anonymous play called “Every Woman in Her Humour.” Chapman wrote “A
Humourous Day’s Mirth,” Day, “Humour Out of Breath,” Fletcher later, “The
Humourous Lieutenant,” and Jonson, besides “Every Man Out of His Humour,”
returned to the title in closing the cycle of his comedies in “The Magnetic Lady
or Humours Reconciled.”
With the performance of “Every Man Out of His Humour” in 1599, by
Shakespeare’s company once more at the Globe, we turn a new page in Jonson’s
career. Despite his many real virtues, if there is one feature more than any other
that distinguishes Jonson, it is his arrogance; and to this may be added his self-
righteousness, especially under criticism or satire. “Every Man Out of His
Humour” is the first of three “comical satires” which Jonson contributed to what
Dekker called the poetomachia or war of the theatres as recent critics have
named it. This play as a fabric of plot is a very slight affair; but as a satirical
picture of the manners of the time, proceeding by means of vivid caricature,
couched in witty and brilliant dialogue and sustained by that righteous
indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire—as a realisation, in
short, of the classical ideal of comedy—there had been nothing like Jonson’s
comedy since the days of Aristophanes. “Every Man in His Humour,” like the
two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally
satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in
which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and
others, Jonson’s contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual
caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Aristophanes so
lampooned Euripides in “The Acharnians” and Socrates in “The Clouds,” to
mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to
again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an
art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of
literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above
and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no
wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels
with his fellow-authors. The circumstances of the origin of this ‘poetomachia’
are far from clear, and those who have written on the topic, except of late, have
not helped to make them clearer. The origin of the “war” has been referred to
satirical references, apparently to Jonson, contained in “The Scourge of
Villainy,” a satire in regular form after the manner of the ancients by John
Marston, a fellow playwright, subsequent friend and collaborator of Jonson’s.
On the other hand, epigrams of Jonson have been discovered (49, 68, and 100)
variously charging “playwright” (reasonably identified with Marston) with
scurrility, cowardice, and plagiarism; though the dates of the epigrams cannot be
ascertained with certainty. Jonson’s own statement of the matter to Drummond
runs: “He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from
him, wrote his “Poetaster” on him; the beginning[s] of them were that Marston
represented him on the stage.”*
[footnote] *The best account of this whole subject is to be found in the edition of
“Poetaster” and “Satiromastrix” by J. H. Penniman in “Belles Lettres Series”
shortly to appear. See also his earlier work, “The War of the Theatres,” 1892,
and the excellent contributions to the subject by H. C. Hart in “Notes and
Queries,” and in his edition of Jonson, 1906.
Here at least we are on certain ground; and the principals of the quarrel are
known. “Histriomastix,” a play revised by Marston in 1598, has been regarded
as the one in which Jonson was thus “represented on the stage”; although the
personage in question, Chrisogonus, a poet, satirist, and translator, poor but
proud, and contemptuous of the common herd, seems rather a complimentary
portrait of Jonson than a caricature. As to the personages actually ridiculed in
“Every Man Out of His Humour,” Carlo Buffone was formerly thought certainly
to be Marston, as he was described as “a public, scurrilous, and profane jester,”
and elsewhere as the grand scourge or second untruss [that is, satirist], of the
time” (Joseph Hall being by his own boast the first, and Marston’s work being
entitled “The Scourge of Villainy”). Apparently we must now prefer for Carlo a
notorious character named Charles Chester, of whom gossipy and inaccurate
Aubrey relates that he was “a bold impertinent fellow…a perpetual talker and
made a noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh
beats him and seals up his mouth (that is his upper and nether beard) with hard
wax. From him Ben Jonson takes his Carlo Buffone [‘i.e.’, jester] in “Every Man
in His Humour” [‘sic’].” Is it conceivable that after all Jonson was ridiculing
Marston, and that the point of the satire consisted in an intentional confusion of
“the grand scourge or second untruss” with “the scurrilous and profane”
Chester?
We have digressed into detail in this particular case to exemplify the difficulties
of criticism in its attempts to identify the allusions in these forgotten quarrels.
We are on sounder ground of fact in recording other manifestations of Jonson’s
enmity. In “The Case is Altered” there is clear ridicule in the character Antonio
Balladino of Anthony Munday, pageant-poet of the city, translator of romances
and playwright as well. In “Every Man in His Humour” there is certainly a
caricature of Samuel Daniel, accepted poet of the court, sonneteer, and
companion of men of fashion. These men held recognised positions to which
Jonson felt his talents better entitled him; they were hence to him his natural
enemies. It seems almost certain that he pursued both in the personages of his
satire through “Every Man Out of His Humour,” and “Cynthia’s Revels,” Daniel
under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and
Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson’s literary
rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that
welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the
pastoral drama. As to Jonson’s personal ambitions with respect to these two men,
it is notable that he became, not pageant-poet, but chronologer to the City of
London; and that, on the accession of the new king, he came soon to triumph
over Daniel as the accepted entertainer of royalty.
“Cynthia’s Revels,” the second “comical satire,” was acted in 1600, and, as a
play, is even more lengthy, elaborate, and impossible than “Every Man Out of
His Humour.” Here personal satire seems to have absorbed everything, and
while much of the caricature is admirable, especially in the detail of witty and
trenchantly satirical dialogue, the central idea of a fountain of self-love is not
very well carried out, and the persons revert at times to abstractions, the action to
allegory. It adds to our wonder that this difficult drama should have been acted
by the Children of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel, among them Nathaniel Field with
whom Jonson read Horace and Martial, and whom he taught later how to make
plays. Another of these precocious little actors was Salathiel Pavy, who died
before he was thirteen, already famed for taking the parts of old men. Him
Jonson immortalised in one of the sweetest of his epitaphs. An interesting
sidelight is this on the character of this redoubtable and rugged satirist, that he
should thus have befriended and tenderly remembered these little theatrical
waifs, some of whom (as we know) had been literally kidnapped to be pressed
into the service of the theatre and whipped to the conning of their difficult parts.
To the caricature of Daniel and Munday in “Cynthia’s Revels” must be added
Anaides (impudence), here assuredly Marston, and Asotus (the prodigal),
interpreted as Lodge or, more perilously, Raleigh. Crites, like Asper-Macilente in